Tag Archives: copywriting

Some people say that selling is a calling, something that may not be meant for everyone. But this perception may already be outdated with the advent of Internet marketing where a sales pitch is often read rather than heard, making copywriting an indispensable skill that every Internet marketer should learn.

There are salesmen and there are copywriters. The difference between the two lies in how the prospect is turned into a buyer with a copywriter using the written word to persuade his audience. Among the sea of copywriters, John Carlton stands out as the most respected and most imitated, although he modestly denies that he is the world’s greatest copywriter alive.

With more than a decade of writing experience behind him and another ten years of teaching struggling writers his techniques, it’s easy to see why Internet marketing experts often turn to John for writing tips to boost their conversions. And John does not disappoint his followers as he generously shares his writing style in seminars, information products and even in interviews.

Here are some of John’s writing tips as revealed in one of his blogs:

Tell a story.

John’s work is characterized by storytelling which works because it entertains, drives the message across albeit subtly and moves readers to take action in the end. For John, storytelling as a selling technique works better than neurolinguistic programming (NLP).

Video-Text combination

There’s some truth to the early 80s song “Video Killed the Radio Star” as MTVs and YouTube videos currently dominate media. John recommends that the best way to sell online is to combine a video sales pitch followed by text that contains your call to action.

Practise using email

While John maintains that there is no magic word that does the trick all the time, he recommends testing different versions of your sales letter using email campaigns. A good formula to adopt would be to start out with some text leading to a URL for people to click on. Suggesting that your email recipients click on a URL is more effective than letting them wait for a video or audio file to download as studies show that people abandon a page that takes more than a few seconds to start playing.

Finally, John recommends that every business owner, marketer and salesman must learn how to write his own sales letters because copywriting is a skill that you will constantly need and once acquired, can never be taken away from you.